Call me insane if you like but I think I want an X1000 now :)

[Hans_]

That is not going to work. WINE is only a compatibility layer to run Windows software on other operating system. There is no CPU emulation and even if there was it would be tricky because Windows software is little endian but WINE is using native endianess.

Wine + qemu would work though. I tried that years ago when I first got my A1-XE (under Linux), and it sort-of worked. I got stuff to run, but all the software that I wanted to run had at least one DLL that WINE was missing at the time.

Of course, if you're going to use qemu, then you could get better compatibility using full system emulation and installing Windows itself. Then your biggest problem would be the emulation overhead...

Hans

[Hans_]

Another question is if WINE can be ported to Amiga at all. I suspect there is too much *nix in WINE.

IMHO, a WINE port to AmigaOS would be closer to a rewrite than a port. After all, WINE maps Windows APIs to their *nix equivalents, and a port would have to remap them to AmigaOS equivalents.

Hans

[Hans_]

I mean that (to me at least), it makes more sense for company to put the effort into providing the 'missing' applications so they run natively on their OS rather than building a daughter board to run their competitors OS and applications.

It costs orders of magnitudes more time and money to write those missing applications than to create the daughter-board. Offering your customers access to a competitor's applications while your own application library is still growing can be a good strategy.

BTW, when I bought my A1-XE, I couldn't justify spending that much money on just a hobby. Being able to use linux software for school/work was one of the deciding factors at the time. It meant that it wasn't just an expensive toy, but something that served a dual purpose.

Hans